Who are the sons of God in Genesis 6?

The canonical evidence points to supernatural beings — not the godly line of Seth.

The phrase in question is בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים (bene ha-Elohim, "sons of God") with the definite article on Elohim. It appears exactly four times in the canonical Old Testament: Genesis 6:2, Genesis 6:4, Job 1:6, and Job 2:1. That's the complete dataset.

In Job 1:6 and 2:1, the sons of God assemble before YHWH in what looks like a divine council — and the adversary (the Hebrew ha-satan here is a role title, not a proper name) comes among them. These are obviously not human patriarchs. They are non-human members of the heavenly court.

Job 38:7 uses the same phrase without the definite article, and the context is even clearer:

"When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy." — Job 38:7

God is speaking from the whirlwind, describing the moment the foundations of the earth were laid. These beings witnessed creation. They predate the existence of humans. They are not Sethite patriarchs.

So the question for Genesis 6 becomes: why would the same phrase that refers to supernatural beings three other times suddenly refer to a human lineage in Genesis 6? The text gives no internal signal to switch categories. There is no verse that calls Seth's descendants "sons of God," no verse that calls Cain's daughters "daughters of men" as a term of contempt, no narrative bridge that sets up the Sethite reading. The reading has to be imported from outside the text — and there is nothing to import, because the phrase never means "godly human lineage" anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible.

The New Testament closes the interpretive question. Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 both describe angels who "did not keep their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling" — and they place this in sequence with the events at Sodom and the flood. The vocabulary is precise: domain (ἀρχήν) and proper dwelling (οἰκητήριον) presuppose that angels have a place, and they left it. Second Peter 2:4 says God "cast them into Tartarus" — using a verb (ταρταρόω) that appears nowhere else in the New Testament, its only occurrence in the entire Greek Bible. The authors are describing a real, bounded transgression.

The Sethite interpretation became popular in the early church partly to avoid the theological difficulty of angelic-human intermarriage. That's an understandable instinct. But the difficulty is in the text — it's what Genesis 6 is describing. Smoothing it out by changing what "sons of God" means requires overriding the consistent canonical usage of the phrase.

The lexical evidence runs entirely one direction. The study After Their Kind follows the canonical trail in full — including how Jesus himself uses this boundary in Luke 20:34–36 to describe what the resurrection will look like.